Outrage and rebuke are flying after explosive news broke late
Wednesday that the National Security Agency, claiming authority under
the Patriot Act and using a secret court order, has demanded (and been
receiving) millions of phone records from Verizon which include all the
company's "telephony metadata" for all its US-based customers over a
three month period.The
"metadata" being provided to the NSA does not provide individual names
for each record, but is a blanket order that allows the government spy
agency access to all call information for any Verizon Business Network
Services customer, including the phone dialed from and to, the location
from which the call was made, and the duration of the call.
Civil rights groups, privacy advocates, and others expressed shock at
the extent of the order signed by the government's secretive Foreign
Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) Court, a copy of which was obtained
by the Guardian newspaper.
Breaking the story, Guardian columnist Glenn Greenwald said
the document shows "for the first time that under the Obama
administration the communication records of millions of US citizens are
being collected indiscriminately and in bulk – regardless of whether
they are suspected of any wrongdoing.""It is beyond Orwellian, and it provides
further evidence of the extent to which basic democratic rights are
being surrendered in secret to the demands of unaccountable intelligence
agencies." - ACLU
Though the Guardian report contains only one order from the
FISA Court covering a set period, most experts agree that the program
has likely been going on for years without disclosure.
Articulating the revelations in plain language, the Electronic
Frontier Foundation's Cindy Cohn and Mark Rofuld explain that the "order
gave the NSA a record of every Verizon customer’s call history
-- every call made, the location of the phone, the time of the call, the
duration of the call, and other 'identifying information' for the phone
and call—from April 25, 2013 (the date the order was issued) to July
19, 2013. The order does not require content or the name of any
subscriber and is issued under 50 USC sec.1861, also known as section 215 of the Patriot Act."
More worrisome, write the EFF staffers is that no indications exist "that this order to Verizon was unique or novel."
"It is very likely that business records orders like this exist for
every major American telecommunication company," they continued. "If you
make calls in the United States, the NSA has those records. And this
has been going on for at least 7 years, and probably longer."
The reaction was harsh and swift, with the ACLU and others calling
for an immediate halt to the program and a large scale investigation.
What follows is a sampling of the responses from those deeply troubled—if not wholly surprised—by the program.ACLU Calls for End to Program, Disclosure of Program’s Scope, Congressional Investigation:

"From a civil liberties perspective, the program could hardly be any
more alarming. It’s a program in which some untold number of innocent
people have been put under the constant surveillance of government
agents," said Jameel Jaffer, American Civil Liberties Union deputy legal
director. "It is beyond Orwellian, and it provides further evidence of
the extent to which basic democratic rights are being surrendered in
secret to the demands of unaccountable intelligence agencies.""Since 9/11, the government has increasingly
classified and concealed not just facts, but the law itself. Such
extreme secrecy is inconsistent with our democratic values of open
government and accountability."
The program was put in place under the Patriot Act’s Section 215, a
controversial provision that authorizes the government to seek secret
court orders for the production of "any tangible thing" relevant to a
foreign-intelligence or terrorism investigation. Recipients of Section
215 orders, such as telecommunications companies, are prohibited from
disclosing that they gave the government their customers’ records.
"Now that this unconstitutional surveillance effort has been
revealed, the government should end it and disclose its full scope, and
Congress should initiate a full investigation," said Michelle
Richardson, legislative counsel with the ACLU Washington Legislative
Office. "This disclosure also highlights the growing gap between the
public’s and the government’s understandings of the many sweeping
surveillance authorities enacted by Congress. Since 9/11, the government
has increasingly classified and concealed not just facts, but the law
itself. Such extreme secrecy is inconsistent with our democratic values
of open government and accountability."

As far as we know this order from the FISA court is the broadest
surveillance order to ever have been issued: it requires no level of
suspicion and applies to all Verizon subscribers anywhere in the U.S. It
also contains a gag order prohibiting Verizon from disclosing
information about the order to anyone other than their counsel."The broadest surveillance order to ever have
been issued: it requires no level of suspicion and applies to all
Verizon subscribers anywhere in the U.S."
The Patriot Act’s incredibly broad surveillance provision purportedly
authorizes an order of this sort, though its constitutionality is in
question and several senators have complained about it. The Patriot Act
provision requires the FBI to notify Congress about the number of such
warrants, but this single order covering millions of people is a
deceptive end-run around that disclosure requirement.

This type of untargeted, wholly domestic surveillance is exactly what EFF, and others have been suing about for years. In 2006, USA Today published a story disclosing that the NSA had compiled a massive database of call records from American telecommunications companies. Our case, Jewel v. NSA, challenging the legality of the NSA’s domestic spying program, has been pending since 2008, but it's predecessor, Hepting v. AT&T filed in 2006, alleged the same surveillance. In 2011, on the 10th Anniversary of the Patriot Act,
we filed a FOIA lawsuit against the Department of Justice for records
about the government’s use of Section 215 – the legal authority the
government was relying on to perform this type of untargeted
surveillance. [...]"It’s time to end the NSA’s unconstitutional domestic surveillance program."
The American people have confirmed how the government has secretly
interpreted Section 215. And we’re angry. It’s time to stop hiding
behind legal privileges and to come clean about Section 215 and FISA.
It’s time to start the national dialogue about our rights in the digital
age. And it’s time to end the NSA’s unconstitutional domestic
surveillance program.

Senator Mark Udall (D-CO), a member of the Senate
Intelligence committee who has publicly, though "vaguely," warned about
such a program responded to the news by tellingCNET:

"While I cannot corroborate the details of this particular report,
this sort of widescale surveillance should concern all of us and is the
kind of government overreach I've said Americans would find shocking. As
a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, it's why I will keep
fighting for transparency and appropriate checks on the surveillance of
Americans."

The primary purpose of large-scale databases such as the NSA's call
records is generally said to be data-mining: rather than examining
individuals, algorithms are used to find patterns of unusual activity
that may mark terrorism or criminal conspiracies.
However, collection and storage of this information gives government a
power it's previously lacked: easy and retroactive surveillance.
If authorities become interested in an individual at a later stage,
and obtain their number, officials can look back through the data and
gather their movements, social network, and more – possibly for several
years (although the secret court order only allows for three months of
data collection).
In essence, you're being watched; the government just doesn't know your name while it's doing it.
Until now, such actions have been kept a tightly guarded and
classified secret, speculated upon, suspected, and occasionally
disclosed by sources, but never proven by documents.
Now the confirmation is in the open, the American public have the
opportunity to decide which definition of private information they
prefer: that of the privacy advocates, or that of the NSA and White
House.

And Twitter:

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Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.Benjamin FranklinOne has not only a legal, but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws.Martin Luther King

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